THE roughly 10,000 lucky folks who currently have Google Glass are about to become the most popular folks on the block.

On Monday, tech giant Google announced that it would expand the number of Glass owners by 30,000 - and that it would ask each of the current owners of the Web-connected hi-tech glasses to recommend three friends to join the pilot program.

Google Glass allows wearers to check their email and surf the Web all with the blink of an eye.

The soon-to-come invites are the geeks' version of the red velvet rope, and are bound to result in wannabes without the glasses lobbying Google Glass owners to please get them on that list.

Google, which made the announcement through its social-networking site Google+, said that the roughly 10,000 people currently in the pilot program will also have "a one-time option to swap out their existing Glass for a new one."

Google is permitting the swap to allow for a hardware update that will enable users to "work with future lines of shades and prescription frames."

The upgraded glasses will also include a mono earbud amid complaints about the current audio system embedded in the glasses.

Folks lucky enough to get on the expanded list will still have to shell out cold, hard cash for the product, which costs $1500 each in the first round. There has been some speculation that the price could come down in subsequent updates.